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By Andres Heuberger

If your company wishes to successfully expand into foreign markets, the question isn't whether to create a Web site in many languages, but how many languages and which ones.

Before taking the plunge you must clearly understand the rationale behind offering visitors multiple languages: Are you looking to generate international sales or develop new markets? Is the effort part of your global marketing and branding effort? Will you embark on regional marketing campaigns? Do you need to offer support to international users?

Synchronize Content

When it comes to international content you have three options:

1. Mirror your English site;
2. Base content on a subset of the English site; or
3. Develop unique content for each target market.

The answer to this question not only affects cost of translating and maintaining your international site but the likelihood of your achieving your goals.

The basic rule is to translate what will be relevant to international users. For instance, international visitors purchasing expensive fountain pens expect a native-language shopping experience, including product descriptions and images, warranty information, etc. A job bank, on the other hand, will require less local- language content and may, in fact, differ drastically from language to language.

Today, many companies develop international sites that represent a subset of the English site with content customized for individual markets. There are three reasons for this:

1. English content must usually be adapted to be useful in international pages. A sampling of issues includes: internationally accessible telephone numbers, metric measurements, different format and content for online forms, appropriate images and text for various target markets.
2. Companies in regulatory-sensitive industries will want to carefully review local regulations. Some countries, for instance, forbid product comparisons as in "brand x is better than brand y".
3. The size of your international site affects the cost and time for both the initial development and for ongoing maintenance. You need to update international pages regularly to encourage visitors to return. If you maintain your entire site in several languages and 10% of the site's content changes each month, this becomes a very expensive undertaking.

There are no "right" answers to these questions. The key is in thoroughly analyzing these issues and their implications before enacting a global markets strategy. This analysis should result in clearly defined milestones, goals, and objectives. The clearer the mission the easier the implementation-and the greater the odds of success.

Check Your Infrastructure

Translated web sites encourage foreign-language communications from visitors. Before going online with your multilingual site, make sure your staff and infrastructure can support this.

Telephone operators should have stock phrases to triage international callers' requests (or better: provide local telephone support). Does your mail server handle high ASCII and can your back-end process 2-byte data? Also, online forms must accommodate multi-part last names, all types of postal codes, and all lengths of phone numbers. (Visit http://www.w3.org/International/ for information on the technology of multilingual web sites.)

Site Maintenance

To facilitate maintenance of your web site, plan your site with international markets in mind. Select features, graphics, and content that will make translation easier.

If your site has customized local-language content, regularly update the site. If the international sites mirror an English site, you must simultaneously update the foreign-language sites as the source site changes. This is sometimes a regulatory requirement but it is always a requirement in principle.

A number of tools are available to automatically identify changed sections in the base (English) site and to efficiently synchronize those changes to the translated versions of the site.

A good example can be found at http://www.lai.com. The site is available in 31 languages on a single server. Developed with its own WebPlexer software, Language Automation's site demonstrates the benefits of database synchronization of foreign-language content. An additional benefit: Translation costs drop because WebPlexer exports files to RTF, allowing translators without HTML skills to update the text.

Directing Traffic to Your Multilingual Site

Many U.S. search engines maintain international directories. In addition, list your multilingual site with international search engines (visit http://rivendel.com/~ric/resources/langsch.html for an excellent list). You may also want to pursue reciprocal linking to multilingual and non-English sites that also target your audience.

As with your English site, it is important that you translate your site's META tags. Foreign-language search engines work like U.S. counterparts. Going through the pages on your site, their "spiders" index your site. Choose terms that are descriptive of your site and your products or services.

The key to successful marketing has always been to speak to your customers' needs. But when entering foreign markets, you must first speak your customer's language. A multilingual Web site is the first step towards creating a truly international presence.

Andres Heuberger is an editor at multilingualwebmaster.com. He frequently writes on issues related to technology, translation, and regulations. Rants and raves can be sent to aheuberger@multilingualwebmaster.com.

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